Bonnets Rouges Force French Government to Abandon New Tax

A tax resistance movement in France has led to riots and has forced the
government to back down on some of its new tax plans. Today I’ll share some
clips from news articles I’ve been reading to try to keep up with the emerging
campaign.

bonnets rouges and Breton flags in the
recent anti-tax demonstrations in Brittany

According to information published Monday
by the newspaper Le Monde, 72% of
French people consider the amount of taxes excessive, and 43% believe that
paying the tax is not a “civic responsibility.”… Should we expect a large tax
revolt movement in France, and if so, under what conditions could it actually
happen?

Atlantico consulted Manon
Sieraczek-Laporte, a lawyer who has written about French taxpatriates. She
mentioned the group Les Tondus
(The Fleeced), a group of businesses that is resisting employment taxes.
She concluded that this was “apparently a phenomenon of organized corporations
(entrepreneurs, artisans, merchangs), which suggests that the ‘May ’68 of
taxes’ is still a ways off. It would require a movement of hundreds of
thousands of people to become of a scale sufficient to force changes.”

Right-wing politician Claude Reichman put it this way: “The movement has
already started, but it is still unsure about which means to employ.”

Pirate Party activist Eric Verhaeghe noted that the tax resistance was not
likely to be launched or encouraged by means of preexisting groups like
Medef (Movement of French Enterprises) or CGPME (General Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises)
because these groups have been coopted by government financial support:
“[they] are largely financed by public funds; some of their leaders are
dependent on government contracts.”

However, groups like “les patrons militants,”
“les pigeons,” and “les
tondus” “are quasi-spontaneous unions of employers or entrepreneurs unhappy
with public policy who intend to influence the debate. To achieve this, they
avoid large official union machines and prefer to act virally and through
flash mobs… For governments, this method is a challenge because it is
difficult to predict and counter. This explains why the movements funded by
public authorities have the mission of channeling these ‘pirates’ and then
breaking them.”

Reichman turned up the rhetoric a notch: “For twenty years I have been
fighting for social liberty. Today, tens of thousands of French people are
choosing to abandon Social Security. I call them the army of the Free French.
They are fighting against the bureaucrats and the welfare-dependent. The Free
French must win for the life of France.”

William Genieys, an author who has written on the history of French politics,
then gave a run-down of some prior French tax rebellions — like
The Fronde
(1648), the
Poujadism of
the 1950s, and a variety of tax discontent
movements in the 1930s. He concludes: “Here
we see that the limit of state power is precisesly its ability to collect
taxes with consent.”

The interviewer asked next what legal steps the current crop of protesters
might take. Sieraczek-Laporte made some speculations in that direction, but
then Reichman declared:

There will be no legal organization. You don’t really believe that in the
current pre-revolutionary climate, the protesters will organize themselves
into an club, elect a president, a general secretary, a treasurer, as an
angler’s club might? This is something quite different: to overthrow a
confiscatory system that ruins France and to replace it with a true democracy
where the State concerns itself with core functions and lets the French
undertake and enjoy the fruits of their labor — the opposite of what is
actually happening!

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